Tool use and the human mind: From basic to materially mediated

operative intentionality

Abstract:

This paper explores some of the cognitive-ecological dimensions of various manual forms of

tool use occurring among human agents. In particular, it clarifies what such forms reveal

about the intentionality of the human mind. Integrating phenomenological, philosophical

and anthropological findings and perspectives, I argue that there exist not one but at least

three different forms of operative types of intentionality, which are associated with three

specific forms of manual technical activity. First, there is the direct type of operative

intentionality that realizes itself through a human agent’s concrete bodily movements.

Second, there is a materially mediated form of operative intentionality, which is required for

performing those technical activities where the external tool directly extends the

movements of the human body. Third, there is a more complex variety of such materially

mediated intentionality, which underpins those forms of tool use where the dynamics of the

tool and those of the body significantly diverge. It is suggested that the relation between

these three forms of operative intentionality is best conceived in terms of a structural

hierarchy.

Keywords:

Operative Intentionality; Cognitive Ecology; Phenomenology; Tool use; Embodied Mind;

Merleau-Ponty; Leroi-Gourhan

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Please do not cite this version. The final version of this paper is available online, DOI 10.1515/cogsem-2014-0014

Introduction

The domains of hominin technological activity and of material culture more generally have

until recently received relatively little attention in mainstream philosophy of mind and

philosophy of cognition, particularly if compared to the vast literature on human linguistic

activity and its cognitive dimensions (Preston 1998, 513-514). This has changed somewhat

over roughly the last two decades with the proliferation of approaches that conceptualize

the mind and its activity as an embodied, enactive, embedded, extended, distributed or

situated process (see, e.g., Chemero 2009; Clark 2011; Clark and Chalmers 1998; Hutchins

1995; Varela, Rosch and Thompson 1991).

In the context of this proliferation, the primary focus of investigation has however

been on those material artifacts that are designed and employed to support cognitive

activities (see, e.g., Hutchins 2001; Norman 1991; also Donald 2010) – and related to this,

on the study of those ‘external’ physical actions performed by an embodied cognitive agent

“that make mental computation easier, faster, or more reliable” (Kirsh and Maglio 1994,

513-514). By comparison, relatively little attention has been devoted to those material

artifacts whose ultimate purpose is not a cognitive one, but rather the causing of some

directed material change in bodies or the environment. So too, the cognitive processes that

are associated with the use of such artifacts have garnered relatively scant attention.1 This

is despite the fact that many of our tool-mediated technical activities are both highly

1 Among the notable exceptions are Preston’s groundbreaking paper on the cognitive dimensions of tool use

(1998); Menary’s discussions of manipulative actions that involve the use of tools (2009; 2010), and a range of

more recent papers exploring the distinctive cognitive traits of human forms of tool use (Vaesen 2012), or, from

a niche-constructionist perspective, the relations between hominin technical activity and the evolution of the

modern human mind (Jeffares 2010; see also Sterelny 2007). Besides the philosophical literature, there is

however a considerable and instructive archaeological literature on the cognitive dimensions of specific

hominin technical activities (see, e.g., Haidle 2009; Malafouris 2008; Malafouris and Renfrew 2010; Wynn 1993)

such as stone-knapping (e.g., De Beaune 2004; Nowell and Davidson 2010) and tool-making activities more

generally (Stout and Chaminade 2009). A more recent attempt to synthesize a wide range of recent research

findings on the cognitive dimensions of tool use from disciplines such as psychology, archaeology, biology and

ergonomics is Baber (2003).

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complex and dynamic, and require a cognitively demanding, real-time and interactive

coordination of brain, body, and cultural artifacts for effective technical action to occur (see

Malafouris 2008).

This paper offers a novel contribution to the study of some of the cognitive-ecological

(see Hutchins 2010)2 dimensions pertaining to those manual forms of the use of external

tools that have been commonly occurring among enculturated human agents – more

dominantly in the past, yet which also still feature prominently in our contemporary

technological life-worlds.3 What distinguishes manual forms of tool use from other forms of

technical action is that a human agent employs “an unattached environmental object to alter

more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object” (Beck 1980, 10), in such

a manner that this agent’s hands and arms guide and provide the power to the technical

process (as in using a hammer, or as in using knife and fork). There is of course also a wide

array of technical actions in which the hands and arms play an important controlling role, as

in using a light switch, an electric drill, or a computer key board. However, these technical

actions do not classify as manual forms of tool use due to the fact that the movements of the

human body only play a peripheral, non-essential role with regard to the actual technical

process and the forces involved (see Leroi-Gourhan 1993, chapter 8).

In particular, this paper explores what those manual forms of tool use can tell us about

the nature of the human mind’s directedness toward to the environment in which it is

situated – that is, to put it in phenomenological terms, about such a mind’s intentionality.

2 Edwin Hutchins has recently defined ‘cognitive ecology’ as an approach that aims to consider and study

“cognitive phenomena in context” (see Hutchins 2010). Such an approach entails, among other things, that close

attention is given to the ways in which cognitive forms of activities are not only informed by the individual

(human) agent’s own embodiment, but also linked to various types of concrete actions that impact on and are

impacted upon by real-world environmental settings. Among the important precursors of such an ecological

perspective on cognition are Gibson’s ecological psychology (1979) and Vygotksy’s cultural-historical

psychology (e.g., Vygotsky 1978).

3 In the broadest sense, enculturation refers to a social process of learning through which individual human

agents, first of all through imitation but then also through instruction and collaboration, acquire the skills and

stocks of knowledge of the culture that surrounds them (see Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner 1993).

3

There has been some disagreement as to what the phenomenological concept of

intentionality, and the Husserlian conception in particular, really amounts to in terms of the

cognitive relationship between mind and world (see Zahavi 2004). However, its core tenet is

clear: ‘Intentionality’ means that individual mind or individual consciousness are essentially

“of something” (Husserl 1982), that is, they are directed at objects, real or imaginary, and

the world at large. Moreover, phenomenological thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and also to

some extent Husserl have argued that such cognitive form of directedness articulates iself,

in its most basic since pre-reflective and ‘operative’ form, in and through an embodied

agent’s concrete movements and practical engagement with its surroundings (see Merleau-

Ponty 1962, 266). In short, according to the phenomenological view, the most basic, even

primary form of intentionality is “in the in the movement, in the action, in the

environmentally attuned responses” of a living agent (Gallagher & Miyahara 2012, 136).

The major claim made in this paper is that a close descriptive scrutiny suggests the

existence of various interrelated yet distinct, embodied forms of intentionality that become

manifest in and through the manual use of tools. As will be shown, some of these forms

clearly go beyond the basic and direct form of ‘operative’ intentionality (Merleau-Ponty

1962) referred to above, which has been the major focus of attention in the more recent

philosophical literature on the embodied mind (see, e.g., Menary 2010; Dreyfus 2002; Kelly

2000; Rowlands 1999; Wakefield and Dreyfus 1991), and whose role has been emphasized

in particular with regard to those sorts of skilled, embodied forms of activity taking the

form of ‘smooth’ or ‘absorbed coping’ (Dreyfus 2002; for further discussions see Reynolds

2006; and more critically, Romdenh-Romluc 2012).

In particular, it is illustrated in this paper that in manual tool use, such basic and direct

form of operative intentionality generally needs to be supplemented by more indirect

materially mediated forms of operative intentionality in order for effective tool use to occur.

What characterizes such latter forms is that at least some of the operative intentionality

making effective technical activity possible is embedded in and realized through the

materiality of the external tool. Two specific varieties – one more basic and one more

complex – of such materially mediated forms of operative intentionality will be identified

and analyzed. It is finally suggested that the relation between these three forms of operative

4

intentionality is best conceived in terms of a structural hierarchy, wherein more abstract

variants presuppose and structurally integrate the basic variants without it being the case

that the former would be reducible to the latter. Overall, this paper thus further articulates

the view that “operative intentionality is clearly distributed” over various components

including the body and environmental structures (Gallagher & Miyahara 2012, 137; see also

Malafouris 2008, 22), through the analysis of several specific ways in which such

distribution occurs throughout tool-mediated technical activities.

The discussion presented in this paper is divided into three main parts. In the first

part I briefly discuss Merleau-Ponty’s conception of motor or operative intentionality. The

aim of this discussion is to clarify, first, the role such intentionality plays in the context of a

human agent’s concrete, manual engagement with its environment, and second, such

intentionality’s cognitive limitations as they pertain to the use of tools (section 1). In the

second part I explore the operative forms of intentionality that are associated with those

more basic forms of tool use in which the external tool directly extends a human agent’s

motor activity (section 2). Drawing also on the work of Ihde (1990) and Verbeek (2008) on

technologically mediated forms of intentionality, among others, it is illustrated that the

basic and direct form of operative intentionality that Merleau-Ponty refers to plays a

necessary yet not sufficient role in such basic forms of technical activity: For effective tool

use to occur, it needs to be supplemented by a materially mediated form of operative

intentionality. In the third part I discuss those specific forms of the manual use of tools

where the dynamics of the tool and those of the arms and hands of the tool user

significantly diverge (section 3), and identify and analyze the forms of operative

intentionality that make the coordination of such complex forms of tool behavior practically

possible.

5

1) Basic operative intentionality: From the hand as tool to tools for the

hand

All forms of human technical activity that involve the use of external tools are

developmentally antedated by those more basic and direct forms where the human body

remains the primary locus of technical action. In order to better understand the practical and

cognitive-ecological dimensions of the shift to tool-based technical activities, it is thus helpful

to at least briefly elaborate upon the agentive role that the human body and the hands in

particular play in the context of a human agent’s direct, practical engagement with the

environment – and on the peculiar features of the body that make such an engagement

possible in the first place.

To begin with the latter point, biological evolution has endowed human agents with a

body that is capable of sophisticated forms of manual technical activity. Following the

enduringly instructive account of human evolution and its biological and technological

dimensions presented by French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1993), of particular

importance in this regard is that the human agent, as a consequence of the evolutionary

acquisition of bipedal locomotion, is gifted with two free hands which are liberated from the

task of locomotion. Owing to this liberation, Leroi-Gourhan suggests, the hands then became

available for being effectively employed for other behavioral purposes, including skillful

technical ones (see Leroi-Gourhan 1993; see on this point also Marzke 1996; Bryne 2004).4

In particular, in biologically modern human agents, the upright structure of the body

facilitates that the manipulative activity of the hands of the body and the perceptual activity

of the visual organs of the head can be combined effectively in many behavioral activities,

including many elaborate technical operations (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 31). In addition to this,

the human hands further possess a range of distinctive, technically enabling features. These

4 Leroi-Gourhan’s overarching evolutionary of human evolution focuses on exploring the human organism’s

biological and cultural specificities which have allowed for technology to increasingly uncouple itself from the

structure and agency of the human body, and from the confines of biological evolution accordingly. An excellent

overview of, and introduction to, Leroi-Gourhan’s oeuvre is Audouze (2002).

6

include opposable thumbs on each hand, the developed capacity for precision grips, and a

high degree of functional lateralization. It is reasonable to assume that without these various

manual features and capacities, the evolutionary pathway toward more sophisticated (and

distinctively human) manual forms of technical activity, including various, behaviorally

complex forms of manual tool use, would have remained blocked.

As indicated above, however, prior to using external tools, human agents technically

engage their environment directly by way of their own body. What generally characterizes

such more direct forms of a human agent’s engagement with its environment, among other

things, is that a relatively close coupling between the activity of this agent’s own perceptual

system and that of its motor systems is maintained. For instance, if a human agent perceives

a material object in the environment that offers an affordance, then this agent may in many

instances immediately respond to this perception by moving its own body toward the object

to inspect this object closer. Or, the agent may perform a grasping movement with its own

hands to get hold of it. It is one of the important and lasting contributions of the

phenomenological tradition to have shown that such concrete, embodied types of motor

action can be directly associated with the functioning of a pre-reflective, cognitive form of

directedness toward the environment, namely the aforementioned ‘motor’ or ‘operative

intentionality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962). It is argued, maybe most convincingly by Merleau-

Ponty, that this form of intentionality becoming manifest in and through an embodied

agent’s movements effectively functions without involving or requiring any explicit recourse

to or mediation by representational or objectifying cognitive functions (see, e.g., Merleau-

Ponty 1962, 266; also 142; also Dreyfus 2002).5

5 Merleau-Ponty first of all introduced the notion of motor or operative intentionality in his discussion of

psychologists Goldstein and Gelb's clinical accounts of the pathological behaviors of their patient Schneider,

who suffered serious brain injuries in WWI. In a discerning discussion, Jensen (2009) has shown that Merleau-

Ponty's use of the pathological behavior of Schneider for his conceptualization of operative intentionality is not

free from ambiguities. These ambiguities, Jensen argues, can however be resolved without rendering Merleau-

Ponty's general account ineffective. With regard to the development of the notion of operative intentionality, it

is furthermore noteworthy that Husserl, prior to Merleau-Ponty, already offered a conception of a concrete,

embodied form of intentionality he referred to as “functioning [fungierend]” (e.g. Husserl 2001; see on this

point also Thomson 2007, 478-479).

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Following Merleau-Ponty, such a basic, operative form of intentionality plays a

cognitively and practically fundamental role in the context of an embodied agent’s active

engagement with its immediate surroundings. This is due to the fact that this basic, operative

form of intentionality allows such agents to effectively perform those ‘concrete’ bodily

movements that are geared to a situation that requires an immediate response (e.g., 1962,

111). According to Merleau-Ponty, movements can be labeled ‘concrete’ if they operate on a

level where no specifically conscious, anticipatory intervention is involved, for instance, as

when one scratches one’s arm, or grasps an object without conscious reflection upon the

object or the movement performed (see, e.g., 1962, 105-106). At the same time, however,

Merleau-Ponty also notes that the behavioral scope of such concrete movements remains

rather restricted. The reason for this restriction is that concrete motor actions remain

directly tied to the experienced ‘here and now’ of an embodied agent, and thus, one may add,

to the functioning of an agent’s own body as the ‘center of action and perception’ (see

Husserl 1989).

This contrasts with those movements performed by embodied agents, and embodied

human agents more specifically, that Merleau-Ponty labels ‘abstract’. According to Merleau-

Ponty, abstract movements are not so much concerned with directly responding to an actual

situation, but rather with constructively projecting a potential situation. In this sense,

Merleau-Ponty suggests, abstract movements can be attributed a “virtual” dimension (1962,

111). Examples of abstract movements are the act of pointing at one’s nose by way of a ruler

one holds in one’s hands (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 103), or the act of (declarative) pointing in

general. Merleau-Ponty observes that in order to perform abstract movements, embodied

agents must possess a cognitive capacity of liberating their own motor activity from their

own, immediate experiential immersion into the concrete situation (see 1962, 111-112;

121). Merleau-Ponty also speaks in this regard of the fact that abstract movements exhibit a

“centrifugal” orientation – in contrast to concrete movements which, in remaining oriented

toward the body and the concretely experienced ‘here and now’, remain “centripetal” in

nature (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 111). In making this observation, Merleau-Ponty draws heavily

on the classic psychological studies on the difference between (abstract and concrete)

gestures of pointing and grasping undertaken by Kurt Goldstein (1971). In a paper that is

8

based on these studies, Goldstein claims that the successful execution of the gesture of

(declarative) pointing presupposes a specific form of transcendence on the part of the

pointing agent, which has its basis in this agents’ cognitive capacity of conceiving of itself as

an identity that is somewhat distinct from the environment (see 1971, 267-268).6

An embodied agent’s capacity to transcend the immediate ‘here and now’ in his own

bodily actions must ultimately also play a fundamental role in his effective manual

mobilization of mediating tools, that is, of external tools that function as a medium (see also

section 2). Among other things, what characterizes such a “mediating function” (Vygotksy

1978, 54) is that the tools employed redirect some of the behavioral activities of the

embodied agents who are using them (see Vygotsky 1978). For such a processes of

mediation to occur in the first place, the embodied agents must be cognitively capable of

attaining a relative displacement from their own bodies – and from the direct perceptual and

practical access to the environment that these bodies provide.7

In regard to such a displacement one can analytically discern both a spatial and a

temporal dimension. With regard to human agents, it has been noted that the practical

capacity for a spatial displacement expresses itself exemplarily in the coordinated use of the

“intervening space” (Straus 1952, 548) that is accessible through the movement of the hands

and arms of the human body, and which functions as a “medium” for action between the

human agent and this agent’s environment (549). In order to use such intervening space

effectively, a human agent requires a basic grasp of this space as something that is directly

constituted through the manipulative activity of its own body, and yet that, at the same time,

6 This cognitive requirement may explain why declarative forms of pointing appear to occur among primates

only, and more specifically, among primates that have been subjected to a process of enculturation. There

remains however some disagreement among researchers as to whether declarative varieties of pointing

activity are restricted to enculturated human primates (Tomasello, Carpenter and Liszkowski 2007), or

whether enculturation can also elicit similar capacities in non-human primates such as chimpanzees and

bonobos (Lyn, Russell and Hopkins 2010).

7 The notion of “displacement” is derived from a classic paper by Hockett (1960). Hockett, however, associates

such displacement exclusively with (human) language, which, he observes, allows language users to refer to

“things that are remote in space and time (or both) from where the talking goes on” (Hockett 1960: 90).

9

is also separate from this body and its activity. This particular form of the comprehension of

space obviously is central to a human agent’s effective manual use of external tools, which

likewise are not a direct part of this agent’s own body, but which also only function

effectively if directly handled by this body. Related to such use of intervening space, effective

manual tool use further requires, on part on the tool user, the practical grasping and mastery

of some sort of spatial dialectics. On the one hand, tools tend to extend the spatial reach the

tool user has within the environment. Yet on the other hand, such expansion is based upon a

shifting of the center of the material, technical engagement with the environment away from

the tool user's own body.

Inseparable from the forms of spatial displacement just discussed, the effective use of

tools also rests upon the capacity of the embodied agents using them to partially liberate

their own behavioral activity from the confines of the experienced ‘now’. Among human

agents, this liberation expresses itself exemplarily in the occurrence of significantly delayed

responses to a problem immediately encountered in the environment, where the delayed

response may involve the use of tools that were not part of the initially encountered

situation (see Gardenförs 1996, 266). For example, human agents, if spotting a potential prey

in the environment, may not try to seize the prey directly, but instead resort to constructing

a sophisticated trap to capture the prey at a later stage. This sort of behavior naturally

presupposes the capacity of such agents to at least partially rein in some of their most

immediate, instinct-based motor responses when encountering environments and objects

that offer an affordance to them. Further vital, at least in the instance of more complex, tool-

mediated responses, is the capacity of human agents to recall a memory (of a particular tool

or technique) independently of the actual situation in which the memory was created (see

Gardenförs 1996, 166).

The prominence of such temporally delayed behavioral responses involving tools

clearly reveals that such agents are highly capable of what has been aptly referred to by

Miriam Haidle (2009) as a more indirect or ‘roundabout-thinking’ to solve given problems.

Haidle also makes the important observation that, in the case of many sophisticated forms of

tool-mediated behavior, tools may actually function in a way that involves a reversal of the

traditional relation between problem and solution orientation. For example, when using a

10

bow and arrow in hunting, human agents engage in activities where they start, not with a

concrete “problem for which a tool is sought as part of the solution”, but, as it were, “with the

solution and look for new problems to which they can apply it” (Haidle 2009, 72). In such

circumstances, one may justifiably say, the external tool really starts to mediate, that is, to

control and redirect a human agent’s technical activity.

To sum up, it has been shown in this section that the capacity of human agents to

engage in complex tool-mediated activities is linked to a) their capacity to achieve a cognitive

liberation from the directly experienced ‘here and now’, and b) to their capacity to partially

decouple their technical activity from that of their own bodies. As it stands, such a

cognitively demanding form of mediated activity can be neither completely nor directly

derived from an individual human agent’s basic, embodied operative intentionality alone. At

the very least, it cannot be derived from any type of operative intentionality that becomes

directly manifest, prior to any form of training and learning, in and through the concrete

movements of such an agent’s own body.

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2) Materially mediated operative intentionality I: Tool use in direct motor

function

If the basic operative intentionality underpinning a human agent’s concrete movements is

not sufficient for tool-mediated behavior to occur, then the question poses itself what

operative sort of intentionality is additionally required to make such behavior possible. At

the very least, this much can be said; the intentionality in question must be of such a sort

that it allows for engaging in more indirect forms of motor activity, where the environment

is acted upon not merely directly through the movements of this agent’s own body but also

through the tool that the body is engaging with.

That embodied forms of operative intentionality can indeed expand to incorporate

external tools has already been proposed repeatedly by Merleau-Ponty (1962); and the

notion of such ‘extended’ intentionality has later been developed upon further by

philosophers of technology Don Ihde (1990) and Peter-Paul Verbeek (2008). In his

phenomenological account of human-technology relations, Ihde (1990, chapter 5)

distinguishes several ways in which human agents engage with technology artifacts, and

through these artifacts, with the world more generally: Embodiment relations, hermeneutic

relations, alterity relations and background relations. Most relevant for the present analysis

of intentionality and tool use is what Ihde refers to as “embodiment relations” (1990, 72).

According to Ihde, what characterizes these embodiment relations is that the technological

artifact is “in a position of mediation” (1990, 73). What is meant by this is that the artifact,

both in spatial and in actional terms, is being situated between the human agent (and its

body) and the world that this agent engages with, thus functioning as a medium between

them. According to Ihde, the embodying of an external tool as a medium involves, among

other things, not only that the tool in question becomes increasingly transparent to the

user, but also that in order to achieve such transparency, the user has acquired a familiarity

with the tool and its use (1990, 73).8 Overall, Ihde’s analyses thus suggest that, in the case

8 For example, one can observe that in many routine types of technical activity, the act of writing for instance,

sufficiently skilled human agents generally do not direct their perceptual attention at the tool they directly

manually handle, but rather at the (visible or tangible transformation of) the external object that the tool is

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of embodiment relations, the technological intentionality in question includes “an extended

materiality within our relations with the world” (Ihde 2012, xii), where such materiality

functions as a medium.

Directly building upon Ihde’s analyses of human-technology relations and the notion

of technological mediation presented therein, Verbeek refers to technologically extended

forms of embodied intentionality as “mediated intentionality” (2008, 389). Similar to Ihde,

Verbeek proposes that in the instance of technologically mediated forms of intentionality,

human agents engage with and experience the world not directly through their own body

(and this body’s basic operative intentionality), “but always via a mediating artifact which

helps to shape a specific relation between humans and world” (Verbeek 2008, 389). Going

beyond Ihde’s analysis of human-technology relations, Verbeek further proposes that there

are at least two additional manifestations of technological intentionality that cannot be

subsumed easily under the rubric of mediated forms of intentionality: “hybrid

intentionality” and “composite intentionality” (2008, 309). What characterizes hybrid forms

of intentionality, Verbeek suggests, is that the technological and the human “form a new

experiencing entity” in such a manner that human and technological components becomes

indistinguishable (2008, 391). Such hybrid intentionality occurs when the technological

artifact shaping intentionality, a cochlear implant for example, physically merges with the

human body. By contrast, what characterizes composite forms of intentionality for Verbeek

is that the technological artifacts themselves realize their own form of directedness to the

world, where such directness becomes then accessible through the intentionality of human

agents (2008, 393).

Given the particular task at hand, both Ihde’s and Verbeek’s analyses however

remain limited in at least two ways, despite the instructive clues they offer to the analysis of

technologically extended or mediated forms of intentionality. First, in their analyses of

human-technology relations, both Ihde and Verbeek do not devote particular attention to

the manual use of tools, and the specific embodied and technical dynamics that are involved

materially interacting with. Such abstraction from the manually operated tool can be considered another

cognitive form of displacement underpinning the technically effective use of external tools.

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in such use. Second, and more generally, the embodiment relations that Ihde refers to (and

Verbeek generally seems to follow Ihde here) seem to be primarily based on the notion that

technology directly extends the activity of the human body.9

However, with regard to the forms of manual tool use occurring among enculturated

human agents and the associated embodied and technical dynamics more specifically, the

notion of technology as ‘extension of the body’ can only be meaningfully applied to those

more basic forms of tool use where both the human agent’s own motor action and the

external tool’s technical action remain closely aligned as to their respective direction.

Following Leroi-Gourhan one can refer to this form of technical activity as tool use in

“direct motor function” (1993, 234).10 Among the tools that are typically used in direct

motor function are the more basic implements such as sticks and knapping stones.

However, a wide range of the tools that are still commonly used in contemporary society,

hammer and pencil for example, are also examples of tools used in direct motor function.

Tool use in direct motor function is based on the direct transmission of muscular

power to an external tool, where the tool directly extends the movement performed by the

hands and arms of the body. This direct transmission and extension explains the direct

alignment between the movements of the tool user’s hands and arms and the external tool

9 Within the phenomenological tradition, the (ultimately limiting) notion of technology being and functioning as

an extension of the body can be traced back as far as Husserl, and it also features prominently in the work of

Merleau-Ponty. In Husserl’s writings, technical artifacts are repeatedly regarded as extensions of specific

functions that are originally performed by the individual human agent’s own body or Leib (see, e.g., Husserl

1973, 276), with some artifacts being understood to extend specific organs of the body and their function (e.g.,

microscopes and binoculars, which extend the eyes and their perceptual function), and others, a car for

instance, being understood to extend the body as a whole (ibid). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty overarchingly

considers technical use-objects to function as a direct sensory or motor extension of the “original structure” of a

human agent’s own body (1962, 91) – apparently regardless of whether the object in question is a simple hand-

held tool such as a cane, or a complex machine such as an automobile (see 1962, 143).

10 This contrasts with those forms of tool use that Leroi-Gourhan refers to as tool use in “indirect motor

function” (1993, 245), where such directional alignment no longer exists (see section 3 for more detail). The

limiting nature of the view that tools extend the human body is also noted by Malafouris in his theory of

‘material engagement’ (2008, 34).

14

in terms of their direction. Notwithstanding this directional alignment, a wide range of

comparatively simple tools used in direct function are capable of significantly extending

both the scope and the force of the movements of the body. A cane or spear, for example,

extends the technical reach of the limbs of the human body, while a tool such as a hammer

is capable of exerting a concentrated force when impacting on target objects that exceeds

anything that could be achieved by bodily means alone.

The direct extension of movements ultimately appears to suggest that the

technologically mediated form of intentionally referred to above, in the instance of tool use in

direct motor function, can be conceived of as directly extending a human agent’s own,

embodied operative intentionality. At the same time, however, the notion of such direct and

smooth extension can be misleading given the mediating function of the tool and its

implications for the interlinking of basic embodied and technologically mediated forms of

operative intentionality. Crucial in this regard is that the mediating function entails a

significant decrease in the technical agency and efficacy of the human agent’s own body and

its movements, if compared to manual forms of activity where the hands directly function as

tools. The cause of this decrease is of course that in all forms of manual tool use, the hand of

the tool user cedes its own immediate technical function to the external tool. Yet at the same

time, it is precisely this ceding that provides the human tool user with a range of new, more

effective ways of materially engaging with the environment.11

The ceding of the technical function naturally entails that the human tool user’s basic

operative intentionality loses much of its direct technical purpose and efficacy, instead

requiring the mediation of the external tool for technically purposeful and effective action to

occur. This does not mean that such basic operative intentionality becomes technically

superfluous – any tool still has to be grasped through a concrete movement and be manually

driven in order for it to be technically effective (see Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 237). But overall,

for any effective use of external tools to occur, the basic embodied form of operative

intentionality needs to be complemented, on the part of the human tool user, by a materially

11 I have further elaborated upon this practical ‘dialectics’ of body and external tool in Woelert (2016). For a classic account of this dialetics see also Leroi-Gourhan (1993, chapter 8).

15

mediated form of operative intentionality that effectively integrates the former operative

intentionality into its own functioning.

16

3) Materially mediated operative intentionality II: Tool use in indirect

motor function

In addition to tool use in direct motor function, human agents also resort to manual forms of

tool use where the technical dynamics of the tool are no longer directionally aligned with the

movements of the human body which originally made the tool effective. It is argued in this

section that the (human) phenomenon of these forms of tool use in “indirect motor function”

(Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 245) suggests the existence of a third, more abstract and complex type

of operative intentionality. This intentionality is structurally distinct from both the embodied

operative type of intentionality that remains restricted to the concrete movements of the

human agent’s body, and the more basic mediated operative intentionality underpinning tool

use in direct motor action.

First, however, let me provide some examples of tool use in indirect motor function,

and illustrate the distinctive technical dynamics that characterize this form of tool use. Most

obviously, the directional divergence between the bodily movement of the tool user and that

of the tool impacting on its target object is apparent in the use of all manually operated tools

that make use of leverage. It is further generally characteristic of all manual tools that

facilitate the translation of movements from one shape to another, for example, that of linear

bodily movements into circular, technical ones.

The distinctive directional divergence between the bodily and technical dynamics

that characterizes tool use in indirect motor function can already be clearly observed in the

use of the most simple leverage tools. For example, when using a crowbar, the direction of

force of the leveraging tool impacting on another material object is diametrically opposed to

the direction of the force which is actively applied to this tool by the human agent’s hands

and arms. The same divergence also can be strikingly observed in the use of technically more

complex manual tools that use leverage, such as a bow and arrow. In shooting an arrow, the

main motor action performed by the human body (the backward drawing of the bowstring

by the hands and arms) is directionally opposed to the swift movement of the arrow flying

forward, towards and forcefully impacting upon its target, after release of the bowstring. An

interesting example of a tool effectively translating movements from one shape to another is 17

the bow drill. The bow drill is a tool that can be used not only for drilling holes but also to

make fire through friction. It is driven by linear movements of the arms of the human body,

which move the bow quickly back and forth. The bowstring in turn propels the drill, which

moves in a circular fashion.

Both the examples of the use of a bow and arrow as well as that of the bow drill

demonstrate that tools used in indirect motor function attain control over the technical

dynamics of the coupled system human tool user-tool to a degree that goes dramatically

beyond what is generally characteristic of tool use in direct motor function. In tool use in

direct motor function, the external tools, in line with their own specific technical structure

and functionality, come to restrict not only the human body’s direct contribution to technical

efficacy, but also significantly limit the scope of the body’s movements that make these tools

technically effective. What is shown overall in the examples discussed above is that tools

employed in indirect motor function partially take over from the body and its agency in

providing structure to the overall technical process. With respect to tool use in indirect

motor function in particular, it thus can be reasonably argued that an embodied human agent

and its external tools constitute a system in which technical agency is distributed (see

Noland 2009, 110).

The distributed agentive nature and the complex dynamics of tool use in indirect motor

function moreover suggest that the mind of the embodied agent capable of effectively

coordinating these more indirect technical activities likewise has to be relatively complex.

This is because the coordination of tool use in indirect motor function requires a mind

capable of coordinating the tool user's own bodily movements in a way that allows for the

anticipation and accommodation of the divergence between these movements and those of

the tool, also continuously taking into account the bearing of both of these movements on the

target object of technical action. Given these complexities, it may not come as a big surprise

that apparently only a very powerful mind has been found to be capable of inventing and

effectively coordinating tool use in indirect motor function: The enculturated human mind.

As a matter of fact, all available empirical evidence suggests that enculturated human agents

18

alone are capable of successfully engaging in more sophisticated forms of tool use in indirect

motor function.12

Ultimately, it can be inferred from the complex dynamics of tool use of indirect motor

function that the operative intentionality facilitating this form of tool use must be

structurally different from both the basic embodied as well as the more basic technologically

or materially mediated forms discussed in the previous two sections. This is because the

operative intentionality underpinning tool use in indirect motor function must be of such an

overarching and ‘abstract’ nature that it can accommodate into its own functioning, not only

the general mediation by the tool that has been discussed in the previous section, but also

the external tool’s semi-autonomous technical dynamics. It is consequently clear that the

form of operative intentionality facilitating tool use in indirect motor function goes beyond

the respective forms of operative intentionality that underpin technical activities where the

hands of the human body directly function as tools, or those technical activities in which the

tool directly extends the movements of the body. Furthermore, the example of tool use in

indirect motor function most clearly illustrates that in tool-mediated activities, the tool

employed does not constitute “the passive content or object of human intentionality”

(Malafouris 2008, 33), but rather functions as a material entity that ‘actively’ mediates and

transforms a human agent’s own, operative intentionality.

At the same time, however, it is obvious that in tool use in indirect motor function, the

high-level, more indirect form of a materially mediated operative intentionality must in its

own functioning integrate both the two lower level forms of operative intentionality for

effective tool use to occur. This is because in tool use in indirect motor function, the concrete

movements of the human body as well as the effective, direct linking of such movements with

the external tool continue to play a technically crucial role, as do consequently the associated

forms of operative intentionality – the basic, embodied intentionality discussed in section 1,

12 According to Beck (1980), some of the apes, for example chimpanzees and orang-utans, have been observed

using simple tools such as sticks in a way that involves applying leverage. However, there appears to be no

example of tool use among non-human animals where both the body’s motor action and the tool’s technical

action, with regard to their respective direction, significantly diverge.

19

and the more basic direct variant of a materially mediated intentionality discussed in section

2.

All of this suggests that the relation between, and interlinking of, the three forms of

operative intentionality discussed in this paper ought to be conceived of in structural terms,

namely in the form of what can be referred to as a ‘structural hierarchy’ (see Merleau-Ponty

1963) or “implication hierarchy” (Zlatev 2009, 169). Both of these notions generally amount

to a hierarchical yet integrative conception of the ways in which lower, more immediate

levels of an organism’s embodied activity are related to those higher, more indirect or

mediated levels of activity (see Merleau-Ponty, 104-124). More specifically, the notion of

structural hierarchy suggests a form of organization where the higher levels of an organism’s

activity and the associated cognitive processes – in this instance the mediated variants of an

operative intentionality – presuppose and structurally integrate the lower ones – the basic

embodied operative intentionality – without it being the case that the latter would ever be

reducible to the former.

20

Conclusion

This paper has explored some of the cognitive-ecological dimensions of various manual

forms of tool use occurring among enculturated human agents, with a particular emphasis

on the various forms of operative intentionality involved in such technical activities. By

means of a close scrutiny of the embodied and technical dynamics involved in three specific

forms of technical activity, it has been shown that there exists not one but at least three

different yet interrelated forms of a technically enabling form of operative intentionality.

There is first of all a basic and direct form of operative intentionality. This

intentionality, whose functioning has been well described by phenomenological thinkers

such as Merleau-Ponty, is directly tied to a human agent’s concrete motor activity and the

concretely experienced situation. However, as has been shown in section 1, this basic,

embodied form of an operative intentionality is necessary yet not sufficient for effective

manual tool use to occur. This is because throughout the use of external tools, this form of

operative intentionality needs to to be supplemented by more indirect and abstract,

materially mediated forms of operative intentionality.

With regard to materially mediated forms of operative intentionality, two varieties

were distinguished. First, extending on the work of Ihde and Verbeek, it has been shown in

section 2 that there is a more basic variety that is associated with forms of tool use where

the external tool directly extends the movements of the hands and arms of the human body.

It has been illustrated that in such forms of tool use, the human agent’s basic operative

intentionality loses much of its direct technical purpose and efficacy, instead requiring the

mediation of the external tool for technically purposeful and effective action to occur.

Second, it has been shown in section 3 that there is also a more complex variety of

materially mediated operative intentionality. This intentionality is associated with those

more indirect forms of manual tool use throughout which the technical dynamics of the tool

and those of the tool user’s own hands and arms significantly diverge as to their respective

direction.

It further has been illustrated in section 3 that in effective tool use in indirect motor

function, the more indirect variety of a materially mediated form of operative intentionality 21

functions in a manner that involves the apparently seamless integration of the two more

basic and direct, embodied and materially mediated forms of operative intentionality

discussed in sections 1 and 2. On this basis, I have proposed that the relation between the

three forms of an operative intentionality discussed in this paper ought best be conceived of

in the terms of a structural hierarchy, wherein the higher level, more indirect forms of

operative intentionality presuppose and structurally integrate the lower, more direct forms

without being reducible them.

The research presented here could be taken further in a number of ways. One

potential avenue for future research concerns the examination of the evolutionary

dimensions of the taxonomy of operative forms of intentionality proposed here. In addition,

the taxonomy proposed here could also enrich current experimental-psychological research

regarding the ways in which the manual use of external tools shapes an embodied agent’s

own body schema and peri-personal space (see for an overview Gallese & Sinigaglia 2010,

747-8). These experimental studies lend some support to the view that the use of tools

eventually leads to an extension of both one’s own peri-personal space and body-schema,

where the tool is incorporated into the representation one has of one’s own body. Utilizing

the taxonomy presented in this paper, it could be instructive to experimentally examine

whether these psychological processes articulate themselves differently depending on

whether a) the tool in question is employed in direct or indirect motor function, and related

to this, whether b) the form of operative intentionality involved is of the simple or of the

complex materially mediated variety.

22

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